Garland

Okay...Yeah, I have seen this shit.
Here's another case, maybe I can bring you around to seeing things from my perspective...if not maybe this'll be food for thought.

Alright, a female friend of your gets drunk and ignores pretty common sense drinking rules, and decides to take a drink from a boy that she doesn't really know...she wakes up the next day in the hospital and not only has she been raped, but beaten, and left in the cold...when somebody came across her and actually called for help...she got to the hospital and they shot her up with atrephine and treated her for hypothermia.

Is it her fucking fault for getting too drunk and putting herself in the position to be exploited...some may argue yes. I don't. It's not so different from the expiremental drug user story, or at least not as different as you people might like to believe.


For the record...I have taken two girls to the hospital for this...one time having to hold a strangers jaw open while trying to get her sister on the phone to take us to the hospital, so she wouldn't asphixiate on her own vomit...didn't know somebody slipped her GHB until the doctors did a blood screening.
Still, I went back to the party to get my coat and knocked a kid out who had tried to prevent me from calling her sister and taking her to the hospital. Right in front of his friends....I grabbed his shirt and ripped it over his head before putting his head between my fist and a wall.

People who exploit others to that degree...rape, date rape...exploitation of children, DRUG ADDICTS, drunk girls, anything of that sort...should be killed. If I could ask god, **** if I believed in God and could ask for one thing, it would be that I could get away with dispatching rapists and exploiters long enough that I could make a dent.

Why?

I had a junkie girlfriend about a year ago, for awhile, who was essentially homeless. I worried every day that she'd been kidnapped or raped. She disappeared from my life for long periods of time...and every single time I knew that something bad could happen.

A few weeks ago...my ex told me that she'd gotten drunk, molested, and almost raped...and my ex made me promise not to seek him out and hurt him...

A few nights ago, it hit me...I'm not very good at connecting the dots between things sometimes, especially with girls, or friends....

my ex-junkie girlfriend had stopped by to see me about 4 months ago after a five month absence...and had told me, unsolicited...that I didn't need to worry, she never turned tricks or did anything like amatuer porn for drugs...
The thought never crossed my mind...but now that I think I can link this shit up, maybe she did. Maybe somebody used her weaknesses to exploit her.
****...I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't know. I just can't forget it for long without worry and anger rearing it's ugly head.

It makes my blood boil in ways you wouldn't believe. 2 of the women in my life...two of the people I've loved the most...

Why do I put this shit up? Because I want you people to see what you're saying. People don't intend to put themselves into a bad position unless they're willing to put themselves at risk. some do.

Most don't see the risks...or they underestimate it. Which isn't their fault...it isn't anyone's fault. It just happens. It is up to the people around to help out.

I have helped a few people in my life...even for people who would have probably left me to die had I been in that situation, yet not once have I ever really regretted it. Sure I may wish harm to some of them now...but in the moment...I did something good...maybe more for my own than for theirs...I don't know if you'll understand that...but I don't intend to elaborate anymore...my dumb ass has probably said too much on this issue anyway.

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homo homini lupus

Mike Brewer

No tap? They thought far enough ahead to bring drugs... how hard would a bottle or three of Aquafina have been?

As a matter of fact, yes. Cops, soldiers, single mothers, and a whole litany of people are nobler than drug addicts. And I don't think any soldier or cop would ever, ever ask you to feel sorry for them for their choice of professions. I know I wouldn't. Dude, I can't believe you just asked if we all thought that a soldier putting himself on the line for his country and his people is any nobler than some shitbag raver who decides to O.D. at a party!

Precisely, Garland. You're a million percent right. The death of a junkie is meaningless. And they didn't make "mistakes," bro. They made choices. Please, dear God, let's add that statement to our drug education programs too. "Don't make your death a meaningless event. Stay away from drugs."

It's no accident to OD because you chose to do something like coke or meth. The minute you decide to get on board with drugs like that, you're choosing to waste your potential, your ambition, and your life.

Look, man. It's clear that you have some friends who like to go out and screw themselves up. It's clear that your loyalty for them runs deep, and I appreciate that. But the drug thing hits home with me, too. My own mother was a casualty of her own choices with drugs and alcohol, and it doesn't change my opinion, my level of sympathy, or my viewpoint. She died at 41 years old after a ten year downward spiral that took one of the most pristine and admirable people I've ever known and turned her into something less than human. So go ahead and tell me that people don't learn from watching what others do to themselves. Believe it if you want. But I learned. She hit bottom over and over again, and we picked her up over and over again until it finally killed her. Would things have been a little different if we'd been tougher earlier? Never know. What I do know is what those choices lead to. So go ahead and defend the poor little drug addicted ravers if you want to. Hell, support them in their efforts to grind their lives into ashes if you think that's what friends do. It's a free country and you're welcome to do it. Me? Having seen my mother's death up close and personal, I choose instead to give my life some meaning. I choose to stay away from that kind of thing, and instead spend my time and energy trying to make my potential a reality. I'll bet most people are pretty hard-pressed to come up with even one example of a person who was better off for having coked themselves into oblivion. As for this kid, I don't care if I ever know.

Quite frankly, I'd start to question it a lot more seriously if I were you. You're actually defending the notion that druggies who OD are in the same category as cops and soldiers who volunteer to put their lives on the line for your freedoms. Never mind that you are blaming others for not having water on hand for some idiot who's O.D.ing. I'll say it again - if they could remember to bring drugs, they can remember to bring water. If they have money to buy drugs, they ought to have money to buy water. It might be possible, Garland, that your choice of friends has inhibited your ability to see plain logic...

Garland

I know it's a poor analogy...but I knew it would evoke the type of emotion in you that it did. You see, Mike...people choose to put themselves into positions for different reasons. Maybe that doesn't mean much...but there are those that choose to become cops or soldiers and end up doing good things, but start out with questionable motives.

Just as there are people who...and listen closely...take drugs a few times to see what's there for themselves. Not turn to drugs. Not anything completely ignoble...but just to have a good time. Maybe they're misguided, or maybe they're not educated on the subject enough to know what's a calculated risk, a relatively safe drug exposure, and what's the equivalent of chemical and enviornmental Russian roulette.

True...they could've brought water, but to deny something to someone in need was what I was getting at. You agreed that it was screwed up earlier, and now the focal point of our discussion has shifted to your contempt and my defense of people who use drugs, not really the forethought behind bringing water.

Yes...I agree...they should've...****, scratch that, I SHOULD have brought more water, knowing full well the risks, but I was misguided and misled into thinking that there would be water provided for free at the event...

who has a rave out in the desert. The difference between a rave and a club is this...rave organisers and security KNOW without a doubt there will be drugs, some security personal even sell. They exploit people, and exploitation is fucked, be it an impressionable youth or a somebody who is intoxicated. Water is a necessity, they know people WILL run out, and they try to maximize their capital.

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homo homini lupus

treelizard

I definitely make a distinction between people who choose to take drugs and have to experience the consequences, and people who get drugs slipped into their drinks without their knowledge, and have to experience the consequences. For instance, to bring up another raver drug, I have an acquaintance who was raped after taking ketamine aka special K. Since she was unable to move her limbs, she was unable to fight back. She made a choice to ingest horse tranquilizer. People who have roofies slipped into their drinks did not make the choice to ingest them, they were tricked into it.

I definitely think that rapists and other predators need to be held accountable for their criminal behavior. But there are ways to minimize those risks. Sadly, most people learn about those things after they are assaulted. I would definitely question people who continue to repeat their pre-assault behavior with the same results over and over again.

For me it's been really empowering to imagine that everything that happens to me is my fault. Empowering because if it is choices that I make that get me into bad situations, I have complete control of the situation because I can change those choices. Many people who make bad choices don't want to change, and that's fine. But I choose to spend my energy working with people who do.

I agree with you that rapists deserve divine punishment, yet somehow helping women who WANT to avoid the situations many of us have naively put ourselvers into, seems to be much more effective. It is true that people may not see or may underestimate the risks--but it's a choice. And when they see the consequences of those risks happening all around them and STILL ENGAGE IN THE SAME BEHAVIOR, it again, is a CHOICE. It is their "fault" if you want to call it that. I question your statement that it's up to the people around them to help them out. Believe me I am all for helping people, but it doesn't work unless they want to be helped. I think you're taking far more responsibility for your friends' health and safety and well-being than you should. THEY are going to do drugs and it's up to YOU to bring them water? That's called "enabling".... and it doesn't "help" people...

Tom Yum

Looks like you're wisening up a bit.

You mentioned earlier that alot of folks use drugs to escape family issues. How many people honestly grow up in a family that has the same dynamics as Leave it to Beaver? Seriously?

Drugs may take away the pain instantly, but you have to keep coming back and the practice becomes addictive. Not to mention, most jobs in the past 10 years have required drug screening as thorough as taking urine, blood and hair samples. You can't fake being that clean.

Ever consider doing some deep soul searching? I mean really sitting down for a few hours and thinking or meditating about what it is you really need and how to get to it?

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Love it, leave it or fix it.

Mike Brewer

Like I said Garland, I have no more sympathy for the idiot security people who sell drugs than I do for the idiots who OD on them. But it's hardly exploitation. It's illegal, it's wrong, and it's screwed up - but exploitation? No. You'd probably be crying like a little kid if those same security guards turned your friends in for doing drugs and wondering why they couldn't just be "cool" about it like the assholes who sell the stuff. Part of the problem I have with the lifestyle you're talking about is that it tends to allow people to get away with thinking everything is someone else's fault. The security guards are assholes for making you leave at the end of the night and not allowing you back inside to "look for your friends." The managers are exploiting your friends and their habit by trying to make money on their bottled water. Everything is a reason to get pissed off at someone else. I wonder how many of your friends' problems would still be other people's fault if they got themselves clean and sober?

I hear the excuse all the time that it's just young people doing it to have fun. Dude, that's a bunch of crap. There are plenty of ways to have fun. Seizures, vomiting, and lethal dehydration aren't among them. Like I said: You play, you pay. It's a way to escape, to rebel, to be different. It's a way to feel grown up when you aren't. Using to the point that you're not in control of yourself - be it outright addiction or just simple stupidity - is not "fun." So you can go ahead and get self-righteous and defensive about it, but the fact is that when drug users develop their habits and put their high before even their basic human needs, they've forfeited any right to sympathy. Like Treelizard said, you can't help anyone who won't help themselves. And when a person would rather buy and carry a bunch of pills than water, they're sending a pretty clear signal that they don't want to help themselves one bit.

Garland

point taken.
I understand the stupidity of my friends' actions, but still...Even though I have ample and good reason to leave them to their own devices, I feel that, deep in my core, I need to be there for them. If that's all I can do, than perhaps that will have to suffice...I do see certain things as being outside of their own fault, although some things are indeed almost certainly consequences of their own actions.

I defend them, I do not defend what they're doing...perhaps I let those two things blur when I think about the issues...because I do love and care about my friends, and I maintain my loyalty towards them, even though I know at times that they are screwing up...I warn and preach to them, and try to sit down heart to heart...but it seems to be so deep rooted in their nature that I can't get through. Even if they die as a result of their choices, I can rest in good conscience KNOWING for certain that I exhausted every possible option trying to help them, and moreover, knowing that I was there for them.

That's all a friend in my position can really do, is be there, and support them, not their habit mind you, but support their safety and support them emotionally and psychologically, to the best of my ability.

I know I'm probably contradicting earlier statments, but I think about this alot, and my opinions about it waver, and it really is a good thing to write it down...because this moment of clarity about the issue might be fleeting as soon as I see them in trouble again, and my messiah complex kicks in.

As Peter Elbow said, "you don't know what you think until you write it."

And I do take what you say to heart, Mike, I do. I might not agree with you on every issue, but I do see a great deal of problems with my perception of what's going on, and it's the questioning of my own actions and thoughs about this predicimant that are going to help me find a best possible way to REALLY help my friends.

Once again, thank you. I do appreciate your advice and your insight, even thinking this stuff over last night has given me some new angles to see things from, and definitely some self analysis of my relationships with these people and why I always jump towards their defense, perhaps at times even at my own expense.

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homo homini lupus

Mike Brewer

Well said, Garland - and pretty mature. Something you keep saying catches my eye (and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the same phrase pop up on Treelizard's radar for that matter). You keep saying you want to "be there for your friends" and you want to "support them." Brother, I can tell you from experience - painful, scarring experience - that "helping them" deal with the consequences of their habits is no help at all. Tree is right. That kind of "help" is only helping them stay on the chemicals that will end up killing them. "Being there" for my Mom, regardless of how badly she needed us to make her face her own consequences allowed her to reach a point at which shooting herself through the heart on my little sister's bed made more sense than kicking the habit. Sometimes, the best thing you can do as a friend is be tough on them. Be tough, do it in a loving way, and be there to help them through the tough stuff that goes with getting clean. The only real help you can give is the kind that gets them away from those drugs and chemicals that make them so vulnerable. If I'd done that years earlier with my own mother, who knows? Maybe she would have been around to meet her daughter in law, her grandkids, and her son in law. Maybe she could have seen my little sister graduate. Maybe she could have done a few of the things she always wanted to do. Instead, we all thought we were "helping" by covering for her, and by nursing her back when she fell. What a tragic, tragic lack of vision on all our parts...

Sagacious Lu

Sure, I run across them all the time, they're actually pretty common. The overwhelming majority of the time they're taken voluntarily, but the risk of having one slipped into your drink is still real in a lot of places. Although rapists have definately used these drugs that isn't what happens a lot of the time. Many of the people I've talked to that claimed have been drugged with GHB (or roofies) described effects that were not consistant with GHB. I think more often than not the "victim" took too much of too many things voluntarily, wound up in real trouble and then made up the story as a cover. After all, she can't tell the truth because very few people have any sympathy for drug users, some even think she deserves to die so she can serve as an example of why you shouldn't do drugs Fortunately no one is likely to question her all that hard, after all, we were good parents, we taught her right from wrong so our precious princess would never do something like that


A lot of cops, soldiers and single mothers use illegal drug. Doctors, lawyers and accountants too for that matter. I see plenty of military people that use drugs when I volunteer. A lot of soldiers love action and excitement. The same thrill seeking trait that makes them willing to jump out of a plane with a rifle in their hand makes drugs like meth and coke very tempting to them. The drug tests the military does aren't an effective deterrent because those drugs don't stay in your body very long. The soldier knows he can party on Friday and still pass his drug test on monday. It's comforting to demonize drug users as criminals and losers but in reality they can be found at all levels of our society. They aren't always losers looking for spare change at the interstate exit, many of them are our co-workers, neighbors, friends and family.

In my experience you can help your friends. Granted, when someone is bound and determined to self-destruct then there is nothing that you or anyone else can do for them but those are just the most extreme cases. Of course you don't stop caring about a friend just because they popped a pill or did a line- you wouldn't be much of a friend if you did. What you can do is refuse to be a part of the drug use while continuing to be a friend. That way you will be there to offer the support your friend needs without encouraging the problem. Sometimes just leading by example makes the strongest statement of all. That's my answer to the problem, I try to lead by example.

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Tom Yum

You're discussing a deeper issue, personal accountability.

A while back, I heard some story on the news of some lady who was out partying with her friends who had gotten really drunk and had taken some kind of hallucinogen. She hit a homeless man crossing the street and he got lodged into her windshield. While he lay half hanging out of the windshiled, cut badly and moaning, she drove her car somewhere else and tried to dump him rather than call an ambulance and render aid.

She tried to lie about it. Whether it was a he or she doesn't matter, its the personal accountability issue, especially when another person's life was at stake.

Coorelation is not causation. Not every thrill seeker is someone who will blow money on meth, coke or an upper. Alot of activities can get you in the zone without chemicals; for some its golf for others it could be parachuting. Ol' George Bush Sr. parachuted for his 75th birthday. I hope I can do that.

Sure some activities are more risky than others, but that's a matter of preferences. I've had to give random blood, hair and urine samples for work - randomly - and allways test negative for illegal substances, but despite this I enjoy sports that alot of people don't.

I guess that makes me crazy (psychological reports say otherwise). I'll accept uncanny as a more fitting adjective...

Thanks. I believe that's the best kind of standard to set!

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Love it, leave it or fix it.

Sagacious Lu

I remember hearing that story, if my memory serves she was a nurse, and it was ecstacy that she was on. That's a very disturbing, story. What I was trying to say is that although rapists definately have used roofies and GHB they're usually taken voluntarily. I think a lot of the reports of these drugs benig slipped to people are bogus cover stories. It's definately something to be aware of, but it's not like there are armies of rapists armed with GHB just waiting for helpless little red riding hood- drugs cause enough real problems without making it worse by being paranoid.

I certainly didn't mean to say that all soldiers are drug users, but I definately think drug use is a problem for the military just like it is for civilian enterprises. My post is a close paraphrase of something a friend of mine told me. He's a recovered meth addict who served in the army. He told me that he was not, by far, the only one who did that sort of thing. Not all drug users can be stereotyped as dead beats who are throwing their life away, many of them are hard working, talented individuals despite the fact that they aren't perfect. The soldier I'm talking about is a great example of that sort of person. I'm not defending the drug use, I'm just saying don't be too quick to judge the guy because there are a lot of good things about him too.

Thanks, I'll try not to stay up on my soap box for too long; I know the longer I keep going the fewer people are likely to pay attention

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Tom Yum

My discussion pertains to the troubles that happen when people are on drugs and personal accountability thereof - related to your discussion of women who willingly take party drugs get taken advantage of and lie about being drugged.

I'm not the judgemental type, Lu. I may have a terrible sense of humor but I'm not about to judge someone about their race, sex or where they are from. I know these things are important to different people, but I plea the golden rule.

If someone I knew personally asked me for help with a drug problem, I'd do what I could to help them. No questions asked.

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Love it, leave it or fix it.

treelizard

Well, my friend definitely had it used on her and she wasn't the only victim, and the guy did get busted eventually.

And btw, she didn't say, "some guy put roofies in my drink"--she was describing an unclear situation where she wasn't sure exactly what had happened and thought it was her fault because she'd had a drink (as in, one single solitary drink) and wasn't sure why she passed out or could only vaguely remember what had happened or what she did wrong...

Sagacious Lu

Sorry, I don't doubt your story at all. That post wasn't directed at your friend, it was just intended to make a point. I'm glad they did eventually get the scum bag.

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treelizard

No problem. As a rule of thumb, I tend to believe people who say they were victimized and try to direct them towards appropriate care and then let the professionals sort it out...